Now, Ms. Clinton is more intelligent than this. She knows that the Secretary of State is not empowered to inaugurate any such policy-shift, and she knows that everyone knows it. Cain says stuff like that just to get noticed, as part of his Very Silly Party spoof campaign -- coolly revealed as a joke cum expenses-paid book tour, in this morning’s fine Alexandra Petri WaPo op-ed:

So why does she do it? She knows it makes her look foolish or unhinged, as when she repeatedly badgered General Petraeus in Congressional testimony, trying to get him to retract his modest assessment of Iran’s current danger to our troops in Iraq: all he could do is keep mildly repeating, “No ma’am… No ma’am … No ma’am …”

My hunch is that it’s for domestic consumption -- but not in the manner of the outlandish statements and outright lies of the Republican Presidential candidates: They are whoring for the moron vote, and reckon they’ll get away with it. No, the former and perhaps future Senator from New York is winking to her own much more well-informed and vigilant lobby, saying: See? I’m willing to look ridiculous in public for your sake, so you know you can trust me. (G. Gordon Liddy used to put his finger in the flame, for similar reassurance to his bosses; hard to say which gesture is the more painful.)

It was the same when John McCain derided Obama as “naïve” for failing to subscribe to the thesis that Iran is as much an existential threat to the United States as the Soviet bloc ever was.

Hmm, let’s see… the whole of Eastern Europe armed to the teeth with tanks, and the oceans aswim with subs carrying nuke-tipped ICBMs, and the memory of victory in the Second World War, and a history of Soviet foreign conquest … versus a single shaky country with no nukes at all so far, and no long-range missiles to deliver them in any case… hmmm…. -- McCain was in the service, he knows that this is nuts; and the Lobby knows that he knows, but they appreciate him saying it anyway.

Hey -- I'm not pushing Ron Paul per se; but these days, among the Republicans, you take sanity wherever you can find it.

[Update 2 Jan 2012]

So now Rick Santorum throws his own grenade into the ring, saying he'll "work openly with Israel" (an interesting choice of words) and, if that (lest we forget) foreign power isn't satisfied by how things are going, will drag America into yet another MidEast war:

Note that, with Iran, back to the wall from the sanctions, now threatening to close the Strait of Hormuz (which it well could do), such outbursts on the part of a potential President are ex-tra-ordinarily irresponsible. He might just launch a self-fulfilling prophecy, pushing the world toward war before he is ever personally in a position to horse around with the nukes.

[Update 28 IV 2012] שַבַ"כ

Plain talk from the former chief of Shabak:

“I don’t believe in a leadership that makes decisions based on messianic feelings…”

Not six days after ISIS slaughtered
130 people in Paris; a few more after it brought down a Russian airliner over
Egypt and blew up a Hezbollah neighborhood in Beirut, Hillary Clinton is
calling for tougher measures against… wait for it… ISIS’s enemies in the
Mideast. Is it time to ask, with Hillary Clinton leading the Democratic field,
who needs Doug Feith and Paul Wolfowitz? Does it need to be spelled out? For
Hillary, the ISIS terror may be a sort of pretext to take the war to those whom
Bibi Netanyahu considers his primary enemy, Iran, and Iran’s Lebanese Shi’ite
ally, Hezbollah. (...) After the George W. Bush presidency, we ought to have
had enough of this.

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About the Author

David Justice studied French at the Sorbonne, mathematics and physics at Harvard and MIT, and math and linguistics at Berkeley.He is the author of The Semantics of Form in Arabic, in the Mirror of European Languages; and of the fictional worksI Don’t Do Divorce Cases (which includes stories originally published in Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine) and Murphy on the Mount. He taught French at Berkeley, and linguistics at the University of Alberta, then worked at Merriam-Webster as Editor of Etymology (where he edited Webster’s Book of Word Histories) and as Editor of Pronunciation.He subsequently was editor-in-chief at Franklin Electronic Publishers.He is currently employed as a language analyst, and consultant for the University of Maryland. He lives with his bride of forty years, overlooking a peaceful lake.